Over the past five years, the BabMed team and our project associates have worked hard to break the proverbial lock on Cuneiform and Talmudic medicine. It was the ERC 7th framework and the great support by Freie Universität Berlin, especially the Department of History and Cultural Studies, that enabled us to systematically study Ancient Babylonian Medicine for the first time since the BAM volumes of Franz Köcher and create a fresh awareness for these early scientific achievements within the academic community as well as the general public.

Our BabMed Annual Workshops and the BabMed Corpora Online edition have, in combination with the BabMed volumes with de Gruyter, Mohr Siebeck and Routledge publishers, prepared the grounds for future research on the History of Medicine not only in Assyriology and Talmudic Studies, but also in Classical and Ancient Studies and Egyptology.

With sincere thanks to everyone involved in the successful course of the BabMed project, and: there is still a great deal left to do.

The BabMed team

]]>J. Cale Johnson at University of Birminghamhttps://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/2018/08/29/j-cale-johnson-at-university-of-birmingham/
Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:35:05 +0000https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/?p=1553J. Cale Johnson left the Freie Universität Berlin in July 2017, but has kept his post as Deputy Head of the BabMed Project. We are happy to announce that he has now taken up a post as Senior Lecturer in Assyriology at the University of Birmingham’s department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/caha).

]]>Journal des Médecines Cunéiformes 31 (August 2018)https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/2018/08/23/journal-des-medecines-cuneiformes-31-august-2018/
Thu, 23 Aug 2018 13:48:32 +0000https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/?p=1550The Journal des Médecines Cunéiformes 31 is out and will be sent to subscribers.
You’ll find the contents of this new issue below.

]]>BabMed imagefilm and MedComm trailer onlinehttps://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/2018/07/20/babmed-imagefilm-and-medcomm-trailer-online/
Fri, 20 Jul 2018 10:33:32 +0000https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/?p=1533BabMed Youtube Channel is open now, featuring the BabMed Imagefilm and a short video on the Medical Commentaries conference held in September 2017 at MPIWG Berlin.

This thesis focuses on the use of animals in Mesopotamian therapeutic practices. It explores the animal used as ingredient for the preparation of medications, as well as the animal, which took part in the healing rituals. The first part reviews the cuneiform sources available for the reconstruction of medical practices and offers an exploration of Mesopotamian fauna through an overview of the taxonomy and the symbolic values attached to animals. It also investigates the practical issues resulting from the use of animals in pharmacopoeia (supply, conservation, methods of implementation etc.). The second part of the study consists in establishing a catalogue of animals encountered in the cuneiform medical texts. It lists and highlights the therapeutic uses of each animal and explores the reasons for their use in specific pathological contexts. The third part is devoted to the cultural and intellectual context in which these scientific Mesopotamian tablets were written. On this occasion, the concepts of “secret” and “encryption” of knowledge are considered. The main interest of this third chapter consists of a presentation and a new proposal for Uruanna = maštakal. This text has been the subject of several assumptions, which question the use of animal ingredients in the pharmacopoeia.

Starting with the first scriptural cultures, methods for classifying and describing (medical) plants have been developed, by means of which the collected knowledge could be handed down diachronically across language and cultural borders. The topic of this workshop is the study of the related text genres of herbals, thereby uniting the outcome of projects in Berlin dedicated to ancient, medieval, and early modern botany. In collaboration with international colleagues, we aim to reveal the similarities, differences, and relationships between the various corpora, beginning with the earliest botanical treatises in Cuneiform and Egyptian script, via the scientific peak of Graeco-Roman scholars and the Middle-Ages up until the later traditions in German language of the Early Modern Period.

Medicine, Magic and Divination

We are happy to break the news that the ninth volume of ‘Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen’ (BAM) is now available for open access on the website of de Gruyter publishing: https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/477148

It was edited and contributed by BabMed Senior PostDoc Researcher Ulrike Steinert and features further contributions by Francesca Rochberg and Irving L. Finkel as well as of course most of the BabMed team, namely Markham J. Geller, J. Cale Johnson, Strahil V. Panayotov and Eric Schmidtchen.

The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of “conjurer” and “physician”. The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.

“Magic” is one of the most colourful terms used to describe phenomena in the history of religions. From the beginning, magic acquired a distinct negative connotation. Early scholars of the history of religion used it intentionally to describe to describe certain knowledge, crafts and practises in ancient pre-Greek and modern indigenous cultures to stress the “otherness” of those cultures in comparison to that of the modern western world and its perceived foundation, the bible on the one hand and the Graeco-Roman world on the other. Despite the term’s obvious shortcomings as a just description of ancient and modern practices, it has never been dropped, probably for lack of a better term in modern western languages and in the respective ancient cultures. In Ancient Near Eastern studies, and by us, it is used faute de mieux, but with an explicit negation of any pejorative meaning, solely as a convenient, established term to describe an ancient belief system consisting of practices, incantations and rituals to influence the world…

]]>Die Babylonisch-Assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen: BabMed at de Gruyter publishershttps://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/2018/06/12/die-babylonisch-assyrische-medizin-in-texten-und-untersuchungen-babmed-at-de-gruyter-publishers/
Tue, 12 Jun 2018 07:29:59 +0000https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/babylonianmedicine/?p=1415Monographs of the BabMed – Babylonian Medicine project will be made available as Open Access publications by de Gruyter publishers in the series initiated by Franz Köcher Die Babylonisch-Assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen.

For the announcement of the series at de Gruyter publishers’ homepage please click here.